At JNU, the big party is not Left or Right

NEW DELHI, NOV 21: It's not about votes, it's not about ideology, it's not about winning or losing. Barring the cadres, vote-counting nig...

NEW DELHI, NOV 21: It8217;s not about votes, it8217;s not about ideology, it8217;s not about winning or losing. Barring the cadres, vote-counting night in Jawaharlal Nehru University JNU is the only time in the year that the students, cutting across party lines, really consider party time. Forget about red, saffron or any shade in between. Neither the colours nor the ideologies behind them are a uniting factor in this University that has been stereotyped as the last bastion of the Left after West Bengal. The unifying colour here is brown, all shades of it. No, we aren8217;t talking skin or race.

Just brown. As in dark brown tea sold by stalls set up by almost every dhaba on campus, from Ganga to Poorvanchal, in creamy brown milk coffee that8217;s a rage on wintry nights, in lightly-browned slices of bread with a thin omelette in between, in earthy brown tobacco that is smoked through the night to keep the cold out and with increasing rarity, the blackish brown of a stick of hash before setting out to spend the nightlistening to the songs being belted out by different party camps.

The camps are quite a story in themselves. Under a shamiana, you can find cadres and supporters of the major parties 8212; AISF, SFI, ABVP, AISA, NSUI and earlier Free Thinkers 8212; huddled together. Within this, there are two groups. One is the core group of leaders and candidates, who sit around a table and work in a psephological8217; 8212; the term makes them feel important 8212; frenzy that might give them a feel of what to expect by morning. For them, this is the longest night.

The other, larger bunch consists of supporters/campaigners who are there with at least one dholak, a few songs and lots of untrained voices. Not surprisingly then, the entire atmosphere is a cacophonous medley of my-ideology-is-best numbers that are lost in each other and which have an auto-stop mechanism each time the public address declares the latest positions. This year, however, the ABVP camp went one step further and included Bollywood numbers such as ShankarMahadevan8217;s Hindustani8217;!

But for many, this night involves politics of a different sort, of the heart. These are the ones who have chosen the Big Night to profess their undying love, at least for the next few semesters. And most of them are first-semester students, who have used the three-odd months since August to decide on the object of their affection. And then there are the no-semester types, the old-timers who graduated years ago, but still like to come back occasionally to get a feel of their younger, wilder days. Some of them also have friends who are still doing research, so this is a good excuse to meet up and down a few pegs before tripping on nostalgia. And invariably end up debating how the famed JNU culture8217; has been diluted since their time. Some things, it seems, never change.